There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing

by | May 5, 2021 | Know

The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.

Source: The New York Times

At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded.

In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish.

In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.

Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.

So what can we do about it? A concept called “flow” may be an antidote to languishing. Flow is that elusive state of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a momentary bond, where your sense of time, place and self melts away. During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well-being wasn’t optimism or mindfulness — it was flow. People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.

An early-morning word game catapults me into flow. A late-night Netflix binge sometimes does the trick too — it transports you into a story where you feel attached to the characters and concerned for their welfare.

While finding new challenges, enjoyable experiences and meaningful work are all possible remedies to languishing, it’s hard to find flow when you can’t focus. This was a problem long before the pandemic, when people were habitually checking email 74 times a day and switching tasks every 10 minutes. In the past year, many of us also have been struggling with interruptions from kids around the house, colleagues around the world, and bosses around the clock. Meh.

Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing.

That means we need to set boundaries. Years ago, a Fortune 500 software company in India tested a simple policy: no interruptions Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. When engineers managed the boundary themselves, 47 percent had above-average productivity. But when the company set quiet time as official policy, 65 percent achieved above-average productivity. Getting more done wasn’t just good for performance at work: We now know that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation is a sense of progress.

I don’t think there’s anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. The lesson of this simple idea is to treat uninterrupted blocks of time as treasures to guard. It clears out constant distractions and gives us the freedom to focus. We can find solace in experiences that capture our full attention.

The pandemic was a big loss. To transcend languishing, try starting with small wins, like the tiny triumph of figuring out a whodunit or the rush of playing a seven-letter word. One of the clearest paths to flow is a just-manageable difficulty: a challenge that stretches your skills and heightens your resolve. That means carving out daily time to focus on a challenge that matters to you — an interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it’s a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.

Change Your Scenery

It’s incredible how much changing my physical view can be refreshing. I’m not alone: Maia and Grace have both taken to going on walks to create needed space. “Partaking in a mindful walk or engaging in some form of physical activity could release endorphins and bolster mood. This could help release endorphins and improve mood and motivation,” says Magavi.

When possible, create a designated space to work separate from where you relax. Maia credits a different area for being “on” with helping her manage negative emotions. “Those moments where you’re able to step out of your digital ‘cave’ and stimulate your senses or move around help me get back into my flow mentally and physically,” she says.

Look Into Therapy

When available, therapy can be a tremendous tool for navigating new and scary feelings, such as those associated with languishing. Grace started therapy earlier in the year after experiencing anger around friends taking trips and meeting up while she took precautions and worried about loved ones. The sessions have helped her in recent weeks.

As Magavi explains, cognitive behavioral therapy can help people reframe their negative thinking while exploring healthy coping behaviors. When necessary, this may also include taking medication. While I haven’t attended therapy during the pandemic, I know my daily 10 mg of Lexapro has helped my well-being tremendously.

For Alex, restarting therapy at the beginning of the pandemic was key to holding herself together. “My therapist has helped me cope with some of the more acute things, like deaths in the family, and we’ve been working on tools to manage my emotional and mental reactions to the more long-term things,” she says. It also led Alex to an ADHD diagnosis recently, which has helped her better understand how her brain functions.

 

How UVic supports you

We all have mental health and our positive sense of mental well-being is unique to us. On this page we have compiled a number of resources and tools to assist you to find the right resources to help your mental health

Download a copy of our Mental Health and Wellbeing Reference Guide.

 

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash